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I'm a well-known mainframe performance guy, with almost 30 years of experience helping customers manage systems. I also dabble in lots of other technology. I've sought to widen the Performance role, incorporating aspects of infrastructural architecture.
I'm a world-famous podcaster and screencaster (albeit VERY thinly spread). :-)

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I was asked an interesting question today by a customer - one with dozens of LPARs and therefore not much time to study each one in excruciating detail... "Given that System High UIC (hereafter referred to as 'UIC') behaves differently in z/OS R.8 how should I treat it?" I've posted on this question in MXG-L Listserver, soliciting experiences and opinions. With z/OS R.8 we replaced the "page-UIC"... [More]

... swear at it. :-) No, I KNOW that's not right - but it's (for me) an irresistibly bad pun. And it's a natural reaction, too. :-) In a recent customer situation I looked at the RMF Workload Activity Report data for a number of service classes. One WLM Sample count was particularly high: "Capped". In fact I look at, with tooling, SMF and the actual field is R723CCCA. (An IBM... [More]

When I first heard of Flash Express as part of the zEC12 announcement -
some time before announcement - I thought of one use case above all,
and one of particularly poignant resonance with some of my readers: Dump capture amelioration. Then, in the marketing materials, I heard of others.
And the discussions have grown more numerous recently.
So it’s time I expressed (pardon the pun) my... [More]